


theory of love

by Macremae



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Healing, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 20:54:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17107952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macremae/pseuds/Macremae
Summary: How Vanessa sees it: a story in three parts.





	theory of love

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in an exchange for wen aka @skepticamobea who in turn drew some amazing art of vanessa and her boys!!! love u wen

This is how Vanessa sees it.

Her husband, Hermann Gottlieb, is gay. Which: yeah, okay, we been knew, folks. Hermykins is about as straight as a Keith Haring painting, and half as rainbow, but he’s getting there so give the poor guy a break. They got married in the summer after college for tax reasons (and also because Vanessa fucking _loves_ scamming people, especially the government), got an apartment together that Hermann could put up blackboards in and Vanessa could use to house exactly ten million fuzzy pillows, and down the line after _that_ , Vanessa decided that she would be utterly awesome at motherhood, so she used her truest and dearest friend as a donor and spent the next nine months complaining about literally everything.

The kid ended up being a miscarriage, so they both cried a lot, drank way too much wine, and decided to maybe hold off on the next try.

But anyway, back to the point. Hermann Gottlieb is gay. He is also madly in love with his _other_ best friend, Newt Geiszler, who is currently in a PPDC jail cell for the utterly heinous crime of dressing like the CEO of Hot Topic.

Oh, yeah, and he also tried to end the world. That too.

Technically, of course, it wasn’t him. That honor would go to the ugly-af aliens in his head who keep making Hermann miserable, so naturally Vanessa wants to punch them in the face. She still hasn’t exactly forgiven Newt for leaving Hermann and breaking his heart, but (again) technically that wasn’t him either, so looks like it’s up to her to, yet again, fix everything.

“Okay,” says Vanessa, sprawled out on Hermann’s PPDC-issued bed, her feet braced against the wall. “Yet again, I must recommend the obvious: have sex with him.”

“No,” Hermann replies, dotting an “i” on his report.

“Why not.”

He sighs heavily. “Because, Vanessa. Newton is possessed by aliens. I can’t just ‘have sex with him’. There’s a consent issue.”

“So start by making out with him, get him to break free through that, and then ask if he wants to smash. I am 99.99999% sure he will say yes.”

“And what about the other percent?”

She shrugs. “Trauma? Idk man, it’s been ten years of a mental chastity belt for the guy. If I were him, I’d want to jump the bones of the first guy with nice cheekbones.” She grins and points a toe at him. “And you have very, very nice cheekbones.”

“Thank you,” he says, and continues writing, “but no. If Newton is going to be brought back,it will be through hard science and research, not the whims of emotion. There is no way possible that it could work.”

As usual, and always, Vanessa is completely right.

During one of their sessions one day, Hermann gets fed up enough to kiss him, and by the time the rest of the hour is up and soldiers come knocking on the cell door, well… let’s just say it’s pretty embarrassing for everyone involved. Hermann refuses to disclose details. Vanessa gets them anyway.

“You never told me you had an exhibitionist kink,” she says, back on the bed, feet in the air. Hermann throws a pen at her.

“I do not.”

“You came, like, ten seconds after they burst in the door.”

He throws another pen at her. “One day you will have to answer for your time on Earth, and God may not be so merciful.”

“Fuck you to assume I’m not immortal.”

“You’re not immortal, Vanessa.”

“I could be. You don’t know everything about m- hey, you got me off topic!”

Hermann slams his head down on the desk and audibly tries not to scream. “For a good reason, do you think?”

“I can’t believe you kept such a big secret from me, your truest and dearest friend!”

“I never intended to tell you anything about my sex life, ever. No matter how much you tell me about yours.”

Vanessa rolls onto her stomach and kicks her legs back and forth. “So. _So_. How’s Newt?”

His face falls a little. “In the infirmary. They’re still keeping him under close watch until the brain scans come back.”

“He was bottoming for you. The Precursors are clearly tops. What more proof do they need?”

Instantly, the frown is back. “ _Vanessa_.”

“ _Hermann._ I am lightening the mood.”

“No, you are failing.”

“And you’re super depressed!” she shouts. “You hadn’t gotten laid in ten years, dude! You should be overjoyed and hormonal! Are you seriously telling me you don’t feel just a little, eensy, teensy, woonsie bit relaxed?”

Hermann stays still for a full three moments, contemplating whether or not he can get away with being silent. Then, he sags. “It was wonderful.”

“ _I fucking knew it_.”

“And that’s all you’re going to hear about it from me!”

“Fine.” She pouts. “So what happens next?”

Hermann grumbles. “Next, we are packing up and getting the hell away from here. The Shatterdome is no place for Newton if he’s going to recover.”

“Where are you thinking of going?”

A soft smile flits across his face. “Someplace nice. The countryside, maybe. Somewhere by the sea.”

Vanessa pulls out her phone and opens Zillow. “What’s your price range?”

Hermann shrugs. “We’re war heroes. Money is no object.”

“Coolsies. I’ll find us a nice two bedroom with a hot tub. Your leg will love it.”

He arches an eyebrow at her. “You’re coming, then?”

Vanessa shoots him a dazzling grin. “Duh. Someone’s got to be there to make sure you two don’t burn the place down while ‘cooking’.”

“I can cook just fine, thank you very much.”

“You can cook okay latkes. _Okay_. Now, do you want an open floor plan?”

Hermann looks adorably confused. “What’s an open floor plan?”

“Uh, wow. Okay. Gonna check that box, then.”

She finds them the cutest little cottage about fifty miles away from Tokyo, in a secluded little fishing town with a market, wildlife preserve, and dolphins that aren’t murdered every two seconds by the Japanese fishing industry. So: perfect.

“I’m Vanessa,” she says, holding out her hand to the nervous looking man that must be Newt Geiszler. “Hermann and I got married to scam the IRS. Nice to meet you!”

“Uh,” says Newt, and gingerly takes her hand. “Newt Geiszler. How have you not been arrested at this point? Also: I think I’m dating your husband?”

“Neat. And I have literally no idea, my license plate literally says ‘$CAMMIN’.”

“Yeah, I saw that.” He still looks nervous, and Vanessa hates when people are nervous around her, so she throws an arm around his shoulder and says:

“Newt, I think you and I are going to be very good friends. Mmkay?”

Newt stiffens a little at the contact, but slowly relaxes. “Uh, yeah. Okay. I mean, any friend of Hermann’s is good by me.”

“Wonderful. Now lemme show you your new loveshack.”

“I’m sorry-- our _what_?”

This is how Vanessa sees it.

Her new secondary best friend, Newt Geiszler, is hella anxious. He doesn’t leave the grounds much, flinches at loud noises, doesn’t like to be touched by anybody but Hermann, and keeps having really loud nightmares. Vanessa has got to fix this.

“Newt Geiszler,” she says one day, sitting on the porch with a glass of Southern iced tea, “I am going to teach you about generalized anxiety disorder.”

Newt blanches and looks down at her from the rocking swing. “What?”

“Generalized anxiety disorder,” she repeats. “You appear to have developed it. I’ve had it my whole life. So: I’m gonna teach you how to not be freaked out by literally everything around you.”

“It’s not just that,” he says, not even denying her totally correct claim. “All my doctors say I’m pretty traumatized. It’s messing with my head.”

“Trauma tends to do that, genius. It’s a chemical imbalance in your brain.”

“Yeah.” He stubs at the porch wood with his toe. “Do y’think I’m ever gonna grow out of it?”

“Sure,” she says. “People do all the time. I mean, there were those Chilean miners who got stuck in a cave for a bunch of days. They’re probably fine now.”

Newt snorts. “Probably.”

“Yeah, probably. People grow and change, dude. Your epidermis sheds and grows back. So does every cell in your body. In a couple years, there’s gonna be a whole entire body that the Precursors never touched. That’s the way humans work.” She grins up at him. “Pretty cool, right?”

He frowns. “How’d you know that?”

“I took gen ed courses in college, stupid. I know what a mitochondria is.”

Newt actually laughs at this. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“For what?”

“Being normal with me. I mean, you treat me like I’m any other person. Like I wasn’t… y’know. Mind controlled for ten years. With you, it feels like we’re just two dumb adults trying to figure life out. That’s… really nice.”

Vanessa shrugs. “I get how it feels to want people to just treat you normally. I’m a famous model, remember? People freak out when they see me. And yeah, it’s a nice ego boost, but it’s hard to have friends when everybody’s constantly looking up to you.”

“People aren’t really ‘looking up to’ me, ‘Ness.”

“Hermann does.”

“Hermann and I are on equal footing. We’re colleagues.”

She laughs a little at this. “Is that seriously what you’re calling your fucking boyfriend?”

“Shut up.”

“No, oh my God, that is such a fucking Drift affect. Jesus Christ.”

“Let me live my life, man.”

Vanessa leans back on the steps and takes a long drink of her iced tea. The summer heat is easier by the ocean, but it’s still hot as fuck. There’s the little cliffside their house is on, then a strip of soft, green grass, then a steep drop to the beach below. The sun flickers off the water like Vanessa’s favorite pair of sparkly boots, like a nice Fenty highlighter, like lip gloss under camera flashes. The sky is blue, blue, blue, and the ocean reflects its gorgeous shade like a softly rippling mirror. Birds caw in the air above them, circling a school of fish a few miles out. The air is salty and warm with the scent of something healing.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll let you live it. Cause guess what?”

“What?”

“It’s gonna get so much fucking better. Promise.”

Newt looks up at the sky, then out over the vast ocean. “God,” he says, “God I hope you’re right.”

This is how Vanessa sees it.

Her life, as Vanessa Valentine, formerly Vanessa Gottlieb but she and Hermann got divorced so he and Newt could get married, is pretty great. She has two whole best friends, a fucking amazing house, all the fresh seafood a girl from Charleston could want, and enough gigs now and then to keep their lives pretty comfortable. Things are good. Fantastic, even.

Newt is getting better, slowly but surely. He’s ventured into town a few times to get food and clothes, and the people are starting to know him as the reclusive man who lives up by the cliffside. Barely any of them heard about the Kaiju attack on Tokyo, and none know who caused it, so he keeps a pretty low profile and chills out most of the time.

Vanessa’s had to buy headphones thanks to her boys _finally_ getting in each others’ pants after ten years of separation, and ten other years of pining. They’re loud, and in love, and super, super gross, so she subscribes to the Daily Meditation Podcast and yells at them to keep it the everloving _fuck_ down.

At one point, Vanessa takes Newt back into Tokyo to get him some shirts that aren’t size “extreme Precursors dieting”, which turns into a full on post-possession makeover, which turns into one of the most fun and ridiculous days of their lives. They try on weird band shirts, and Vanessa glares at anyone who so much as looks at Newt funny, and head back home at the end of the day with cute stuff for everyone (even Hermann, who’s gotten exactly 15% more stylish since the end of the first war, bless his heart).

Vanessa sees it like this: her boys are getting better. They’re really doing it. They laugh, and cry, and sometimes scream along to Ramshackle Glory (but shh, don’t tell) when the bad days get worse, but everything turns out alright in the end. Because that’s what Vanessa believes in, okay? She believes in the inherent goodness of people, and the amazing things they can do, and the light inside every soul, blah blah blah.

She believes in Newt and Hermann, which is good, because they believe in her too.


End file.
